This is Your Brain on Transformation
Sep 27, 2012, 10:45 AM, Posted by Mike Painter
Mike Painter
My recent journey to Mayo Clinic’s Transform 2012 began with a bike ride. I was up at 4:00 a.m. and drove for an hour to join hundreds of other cyclists in northern New Jersey for a 7:15 a.m. ride start. 107 miles and 7,600 feet of climbing later, I uploaded my ride stats to Strava, chatted some with colleagues, grabbed a bit of post-ride lunch, and blasted home. I made it to the Philadelphia airport just in time for my 7:00 p.m. flight. After a connection in Chicago, I arrived in Minneapolis around midnight, rented a car, and then drove 80 miles in the early morning hours across rural Minnesota, eventually arriving at my hotel in the town of Rochester.
Bright and early that morning at the meeting, feeling surprisingly bushy-tailed, I encountered a large gathering, almost like a mirage rising from the prairie, of curious, engaged people talking earnestly about how they were transforming American health care. But of course it wasn’t a mirage. It was real and impressive. Our national audacious effort to transform the health care colossus from its current state of dysfunction and inefficiency is impossibly complex and difficult. We know that. Nevertheless, my reaction to Transform 2012 was not simply because I found a large gathering focused on that health care transformation. No, the truly remarkable thing is that here was yet another of many large gatherings of engaged people working all over the United States to transform health care.